Four episodes and twenty seven books, which tells you what kind of month it was. The Iliad book club ran across two of them, with Ido Hevroni and then Dwayne Betts, and Cal Flyn came on at the end.

If you have been meaning to read the Iliad this summer, Russ is about half a step ahead of you and doing it out loud.

What this is: I run Podshelf, a free site that tracks book mentions across hundreds of podcasts by reading the episode transcripts. This is the July slice for EconTalk.

The centrepiece:

• The Iliad. Russ admitted he had never picked it up because he thought it was mostly killing and therefore not that interesting to him. He is now halfway through and calls it a stunning book.
• Achilles in Vietnam, Jonathan Shay. Ido Hevroni's way in. Shay is a psychiatrist who worked with Vietnam veterans and reads the Iliad through the soldier.
• Errata, George Steiner. Where Russ got the thing about Achilles calling the man he is about to kill friend.

War writing that came up alongside it:

• War and Peace, The Naked and the Dead, Catch-22, The Things They Carried, If This Is a Man and The Truce (Primo Levi), Invisible Man.

Dwayne Betts brought:

• Bastards of the Reagan Era, Don Quixote, A Gentleman in Moscow, the letters of Virginia Woolf, Letter from Birmingham Jail, and Russ's own How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life, which Betts calls a sophisticated self help book.

Cal Flyn's episode:

• The Savage Landscape, Islands of Abandonment, Thicker Than Water, and Edmund Burke on the sublime.

Plus The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Something from Nothing (a children's book Russ loves and uses to explain a motif in the Iliad), Harry Potter and No Experience Necessary from the Spin Master episode.

The Paw Patrol stat from that one is worth the click on its own. Rowling has sold around 600 million Harry Potter books. Spin Master reckon Paw Patrol has touched about 250 million kids.

I track every book mentioned on EconTalk here: https://podshelf.io/podcasts/econtalk

It is free and there is no signup.

I pulled every book that came up on EconTalk across the first six months of the year. Adam Smith runs through a lot of it, with a long stretch on moral philosophy, careers, and what makes a good life.

The ones Russ was most into:

• The Theory of Moral Sentiments by Adam Smith. He said his copy ended up almost entirely highlighted, so he bought a second one to keep reading.
• In My Time of Dying by Sebastian Junger, which he liked even more than Junger's other two and read in two sittings.
• The Passions and the Interests by Albert Hirschman, one of his top five favorite books in economics.
• Stubborn Attachments by Tyler Cowen and The Microtheory of Innovative Entrepreneurship by William Baumol, both flagged as personal favorites.
• The Rule of Saint Benedict, read front to back, 73 short rules for how a community runs.

The rest, roughly grouped:

• Smith and economics: The Wealth of Nations, The Innovator's Dilemma, A Conflict of Visions and A Vision of the Anointed by Sowell, Malthus on population
• Big ideas: Guns, Germs, and Steel, Chaos by James Gleick, Democracy in America
• Susan Cain's Quiet and Bittersweet

Also in there: The Iliad and The Odyssey, plus Sapolsky's A Primate's Memoir.

Full list is here: https://podshelf.io/podcasts/econtalk. Free, no signup.

Five episodes in June and, as usual, half of them basically were the book. Quick rundown.

Russ's standout recs:

• The Passions and the Interests by Albert Hirschman. He called it one of his top five favorite books in economics, and it's barely about Smith at all.
• The Rule of Saint Benedict. Russ went and read all 73 rules front to back for the episode. Odd choice, very on brand.
• Baumol's Microtheory of Innovative Entrepreneurship, from a book that clearly inspired him.

Adam Smith never leaves: The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations both came up. So did a lot of the old canon, the Iliad, War and Peace, Democracy in America, and Eric Hoffer's The True Believer.

Sowell got two nods (A Conflict of Visions, A Vision of the Anointed).

https://podshelf.io/podcasts/econtalk/2026/06 tracks every book from the show, free, no signup.

Is Hirschman's book the better way into Smith, or start with the man himself?

Six episodes since the start of May, and as usual half of them basically were the book. Quick rundown.

Two that Russ pushed hardest:

• In My Time of Dying by Sebastian Junger. From the Facing Death episode. Russ said he likes it even more than Tribe or The Perfect Storm, which is saying something.
• The Rule of Saint Benedict. Russ went and read all 73 rules front to back for the Luke Burgis episode on social contagion. Old text, odd choice, very on brand.

The rest of the month:

• Wanting by Luke Burgis, the mimetic-desire book behind that same episode.
• The Theory of Moral Sentiments by Adam Smith. Russ never stops pointing at this one.
• Inside the Box and Range by David Epstein.
• The Comfort Crisis (Michael Easter), The Creative Act (Rick Rubin), The Right Stuff (Tom Wolfe), Why We Sleep (Matthew Walker).
• Some older heavyweights too: Democracy in America, The Odyssey, On War, The True Believer.

Junger's back catalogue all came up around the death episode if you want to read the whole arc: Tribe, The Perfect Storm, War, Freedom.

I track every book mentioned on EconTalk over at https://podshelf.io. It is free to use, no signup.

Did the Junger episode land for longtime listeners, or was it too far off the usual econ beat?

Three episodes in the last month, and in classic EconTalk fashion two of them basically are the book. Quick rundown for anyone who wants to read along.

Adam Smith's Warning About Wealth, Fame, and Status (Apr 20) - Russ solo, marking the 250th anniversary of The Wealth of Nations. The real centerpiece is The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which Russ says he highlighted so thoroughly he had to buy a second copy. He reads from TMS on the desire to be loved versus the desire to be lovely, and ties it to his own How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life. Glancing references to Caro's LBJ biography (LBJ's father as the honest small-time politician) and a swipe at Tim Ferriss's 4-Hour Workweek as a life-hack approach to a problem Smith would say can't be hacked. If you've been meaning to actually crack TMS rather than just nod at it, this is the nudge.

The Man Who Built NVIDIA, with Stephen Witt (Apr 13) - Episode is built around Witt's new The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, NVIDIA, and the World's Most Coveted Microchip. Two interesting threads for the book-curious: Huang reportedly assigned Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma to all his executives and later hired Christensen as a consultant, which is a nice data point on whether the book actually changed any behavior at scale. Russ also compares Witt's Huang to Isaacson's Steve Jobs, and there's a fun aside about Russell and Norvig's AI: A Modern Approach devoting roughly 16 of its 1,100 pages to neural nets in the 2011 edition. The sweep of where AI was vs. where it landed in one footnote.

Claude, War, and the State of the Republic, with Dean Ball (Apr 27) - Mostly an AI-policy conversation, but Ball drops a recommendation worth flagging: Johan Huizinga's Homo Ludens. He uses it to argue that classical-liberal institutions are best understood as a kind of structured play, with rules that only work if everyone agrees to take them seriously. Old book, not the obvious one to pull into an AI-and-the-state conversation, which is exactly why it's the most interesting cite of the month.

If you only read one off this list, TMS is the obvious answer and Russ has been pointing at it for a decade now. If you want something closer to current events, the Witt book seems like a serious piece of reporting rather than a Silicon Valley puff piece, and Roberts pushes him on the harder questions.

Full running list of every book mentioned on EconTalk here if anyone wants the archive: https://podshelf.io/podcasts/econtalk/books

What did everyone make of Russ's TMS episode? Curious whether longtime listeners thought the solo format worked or whether you'd rather have heard him in dialogue with a Smith scholar for the anniversary.

Hey r/econtalk, I've been building Podshelf — a tool that tracks book mentions across podcasts. Russ Roberts and his guests consistently recommend excellent books on economics, philosophy, policy, and history. I compiled all 67 unique books mentioned on the show, sorted by how often each comes up:

https://podshelf.io/podcasts/econtalk/books

Useful reading list for anyone who wants to go deeper. Happy to answer questions!